Special characters in PDF417 barcode

[SandPlus]

Hi

I'm trying to add a PDF417 barcode to a stimulsoft report in a ASP.NET MVC app. Stimulsoft version is 2018.3.5.

The problem is that when the barcode data contains special characters from the Croatian language, I get the “Input data not valid for this barcode” error. My understanding is that there should be an option to change the encoding to UTF-8. I found this option for the QR barcode (StiOptions.Engine.BarcodeQRCodeDefaultByteModeEncoding = StiQRCodeECIMode.UTF_8), and it works fine with all characters, but I can’t find it for PDF417.

I attached a picture with all the designer options I’m using. The code here contains just one of the characters that causes the error.

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

PDF417 was never originally designed to support Multi-byte character sets (Unicode). Some modern readers now allow for UTF-8 encoded PDF417 to work around this limitation.

But you are the first person to ask about this in the last five years. The vast majority of users use the QR-Code barcode for Unicode.
So unfortunately we have not updated the functionality of this PDF417 barcode in a long time.
If you need it, send a request to the support@stimulsoft.com, we will try to investigate the issue.

Thank you.

[SandPlus]

Thanks for the info.

All things considered, we decided to just replace the problematic characters with similar ones that work.

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

Thank you for the information.